CAMP Seminar: The temporal structure of cognition: What do we know about the speed of thought?

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One of the most compelling illusions of the mind is that we experience reality in real time, but the laws of physics guarantee that our perception lags reality by at least the amount of time required for sensory information to reach the brain. Beyond this point, it becomes more difficult to understand how long it takes for a thought to occur. Is it the moment at which a cortical neuron becomes active? Or is there a critical mass of neural activity that is required? If two stimuli reach the brain at exactly the same time, why are they sometimes perceived as being sequential? These are difficult questions to address but the past few decades have produced a remarkable amount of data that provides some answers. This talk will explore questions related to the amount of time that is required for the brain to form conscious representations of sensory stimuli. The talk will also touch on the decisions that the mind makes about whether or not to fully process a stimulus, before it reaches the point of awareness. Evidence will be drawn from a variety of sources, including visual illusions, behavior, computational models, and recordings of neural activity directly from the brain.